Diplomatic Cables Research Articles

Wikileaks and the Future of Diplomacy

When a diplomat says “yes,” as Voltaire famously observed, he means “perhaps.” When he says “perhaps,” he means “no.” And if he says “no,” he is not a diplomat.Such diplomatic niceties are dependent on the discretion and nuance that enable the maintenance of cordial relations with host governments. To be useful to one’s home government, however, the diplomat must be candid. The line between these two discourses is a thin one, but can be maintained through the security of confidential communications and an element of willful blindness. For centuries, this was done through the inviolability of the diplomatic pouch. In a world of electronic communications, however, diplomatic cables must pass through many more virtual hands - and, if intercepted, can be shared instantly with the entire world.Though widely identified as the problem, WikiLeaks is really a symptom of structural changes in the management of information. The guerrilla journalism Web site was launched in 2006 and capitalized on the virtues and the vices of the Internet. The virtues are that the Internet is decentralized, anonymous, and user-driven. Decentralization makes it hard to shut down. Anonymity enables the protection of sources. The user-driven nature of this Web 2.0 phenomenon encourages those sources to come forward.These virtues of the Internet, of course, are also its vices. Decentralization undermines meaningful accountability. Anonymity enables the avoidance of responsibility. And being user-driven leaves quality control to the audience rather than the actors.

WikiLeaks: the price of sharing data

Two important issues have been raised by the recent publication of secret American diplomatic cables. The first – which affects all countries – is the difficulty in deciding whether and how, in the interests of security, to share secret information among government departments. The disclosures are the price of a deliberate policy by the United States to share information more widely among its officials following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. The second, for Washington, is the need to restore trust in its diplomacy. The signs are that it is making progress with this.

Leaks and Lessons

The 28th of November 2010 saw the great American diplomatic cables leak, under the auspices of WikiLeaks and published, after screening, by the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, the Guardian a...

Doubting the Global War on Terror

Soon after Al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the Bush Administration described its new grand strategy: the "Global War on Terror". This article examines the 'two-track' process that US neoconservatives and 'echo chamber' media used, to promote the GWOT grand strategy. It re-examines why many experts and institutions expressed doubt about specific claims the Bush Administration made to support the 2003 Iraq War. Historical counterfactuals suggest that the Bush Administration's Global War on Terror could have evolved very differently . . . or not occurred at all.

WikiLeaks ‘Cablegate’ Dominates Year-End Headlines

Drew Amorosi recounts the events surrounding WikiLeaks' publication of thousands of confidential US diplomatic cables that recently garnered so much international attention, and takes a look at the political fallout.

Saudi Arabia: testing times ahead

A series of recent events has drawn international attention to the prospects for Saudi stability and security. On 22 November, King Abdullah departed for medical treatment in New York. A few days later, the government announced that that there had been 149 al-Qaeda-related detentions over the previous eight months. Separately, an al-Qaeda plot originating in Yemen to bomb aircraft was exposed. Finally, American diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks revealed the king's intense private concern over Iran. These events have served as a reminder of the range of domestic and international challenges Saudi Arabia faces over the next few years. However, past experience suggests it is a mistake to underestimate the strength and adaptability of the Saudi political and social system.

The UK Government and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda

The genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994 will remain, for our generation, the enduring failure to intervene in the face of massive human-rights abuse. The genocide lasted for three months, and during that time an estimated one million people were killed. The killing was organized in advance; it was the direct result of a deliberate government policy and was carried out according to an explicit strategy. The combination of revelations about the scale and the intensity of the genocide, the failure to intervene to prevent it or to stop its progression country-wide, and the suppression of information about what was actually happening is a shocking indictment not just of the UN Security Council but of governments and individuals who knew what was happening and who chose to remain silent. The failure of UN policy toward Rwanda, a policy devised by members of the Security Council, had a decisive effect on events. It merits precise documentation. The focus of this article is the role of the British government led by Prime Minister John Major. While the United Nations has shown its willingness to uncover how and why it reacted the way it did, in the United Kingdom there continues to be a reluctance to try to account for Britain’s policies toward Rwanda. Neither press nor Parliament has shown any enthusiasm to scrutinize this particular part of history or to explain why the United Kingdom, a country with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, should have chosen to influence events in the way it did. Britain, far from taking a back seat, was instrumental in shaping the UN response to the crisis, and this leaves unanswered a central question: Was the United Kingdom, a country with special power and privilege in the Security Council, impotent or unwilling to implement the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG), either to prevent the occurrence of genocide in Rwanda or, once it began, to stop it from spreading? In the United Kingdom, a country where secrecy pervades most aspects of government, the issue of Rwanda is particularly sensitive. There are continuing attempts to obscure individual responsibility in the decision-making process. There is even a claim that, in the archives of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in Whitehall, the paper trail on Rwanda, 1990–1994, has been weeded. There is resistance to release any of the diplomatic cables that passed between the policy makers in London and Britain’s UN mission in New York. Some officials involved at the time are reluctant even to discuss Rwanda, a reluctance bolstered by the ongoing failure of press and Parliament to examine this episode in British foreign policy. In the writings and memoirs of those concerned, there is hardly a relevant word—in John Major’s case, the genocide has completely vanished from the public version of his period in office.

Nothing Sacred: Nazi Espionage against the Vatican, 1939-1945 by David Alvarez and Robert A. Graham, S.J.

142BOOKREVIEVfS Nothing Sacred:Nazi Espionage against the Vatican, 1939-1945. By David Alvarez and Robert A. Graham, SJ. (London: Frank Cass; distributed by ISBS, Portland, Oregon. 1997. Pp. 190. $42.50 clothbound; $19.50 paperback.) "No one knows more about the wartime Vatican," Peter Hebblethwaite wrote in 1993, "than Father Robert Graham." In Nothing Sacred, the late Reverend Robert A. Graham, SJ., and his co-author, DavidJ. Alvarez, lead us on an iUuminating detective investigation through the halls of the Vatican during World War II. This work is the first to critically examine the veil of espionage surrounding the Holy See during one of its most historiographically controversial periods. As our authors take us on their rounds, they introduce us to a wealth of new material concerning the Third Reich's attempts to infiltrate the Roman Curia. German efforts to penetrate the walls of theVatican ranged from savvy and smooth to confusing and comical. At the end of their investigation, Graham and Alvarez conclude that despite some spirited attempts to collect curial intelligence, no secret information was gleaned and no "hard targets" of Vatican diplomacy were ever compromised to the Reich. In short, Nazi attempts to infiltrate the most confidential echelons of the Holy See's diplomatic corps met with umitigated failure. The most compelling portions of the book are devoted to describing "HUMINT" that is to say, the human intelligence gathering techniques directed by the Nazis against the Vatican. Such techniques included the recruitment of Catholic university professors, the targeting of curial clerks, and even the introduction of ersatz German "seminarians" into the German College in Rome. Our authors contend that these efforts were unsuccessful because "with the onset of war, the secrecy which normally characterized the internal affairs of the Papal Secretariat of State became even stricter" (p. 3). Vatican security, it seems, thwarted the best attempts of the Nazi intelligence system. Yet, regardless of their disappointments in Rome, the Germans did make a great deal of headway on the home front. One of the major revelations of the book is its examination of Nazi infiltration of the German Bishops' Conference, the German Catholic Press, and the Catholic university system. What the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) failed to do internationally,it brilliantly succeeded in doing domestically. Its major coup included the collection of the internal memoranda of the German national episcopal conference. The newest and most important contribution that this book makes to the literature of wartime Vatican diplomacy is its exposition of Vatican cryptology Here, DavidJ. Alvarez masterfully presents the sophisticated themes of GermanVatican wartime codes. And it is here where Nazi efforts were most fruitful. While the Vatican considered its most sophisticated codes invulnerable throughout the war, by May of 1940 the Nazis were reading more than half of the Holy See's signal traffic. More importantly, by 1943 the Reich Security Administration had compromised all of the Vatican codes. The Vatican, for its part, surmised that at least some of its codes had been broken, but trusted that its newest codes were inviolate. The Secretariat was disabused of this notion by book reviews143 late 1944 and came to the realization that "all governments" were able to read their codes "with great facility" (p. 166). Ironically, this new information has serious ramifications for the argument advanced by Father Graham in the first portion of the book. Specifically, it seems reasonable to conclude that the RSHA might deem it unnecessary to devote valuable human intelligence resources against the Holy See if it were already reading its most sensitive diplomatic cables. Moreover, since the Holy See's military and geo-strategic importance is negligible at best, it is precisely the concession of its diplomatic correspondence that might be considered the "golden nugget" of anti-Vatican intelligence. Most historians of Vatican diplomacy during this era agree that the primary intelligence function of foreign missions to the Vatican was that of the "listening post." Given that the Holy See's codes were "hopelessly compromised" early on, Nazi intelligence efforts against the Vatican might be considered a sound success. Barring these observations , the study remains essential reading for any researcher or graduate student interested in Vatican diplomacy, Nazi intelligence techniques, and broader surveys...